


Of Mice and Men

by inabathrobe



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Literary Reference, M/M, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-23
Updated: 2009-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:23:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inabathrobe/pseuds/inabathrobe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony discovers the contents of the BOYS folder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Mice and Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boywonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boywonder/gifts).



> Many thanks to Sophie for being my canon consultant for Tony and for indirectly inspiring this and to Toast for cheerleading. Concept debt to Cape & Cowl mid-2009. Written for the C&C Summer Fic Exchange 2009.
> 
> Best viewed in Firefox.
> 
> This was originally posted to [my LJ](http://inabathrobe.livejournal.com/48363.html).

He isn't snooping. Tony Stark doesn't snoop. Besides, he trusts Adrian (within reason, anyway). He is simply keeping himself occupied until Adrian gets out of his meeting or escapes from the clinic or finishes whatever it is Adrian does that is making him fifteen minutes late for their lunch date. Well, Adrian will eventually turn up, anyway, so it's just a matter of waiting.

Unless, of course, they had said they were meeting at the restaurant.

Adrian would find him if they were. He always did. Tony left being efficient and punctilious to Adrian. (If he had just been a redhead, Tony would have felt right at home.) In fact, Adrian is so efficient and neat and organized that Tony has already gone through all the papers on —and in— his desk. They are, for the most part, work related. Tony is left with no choice: he will simply have to go on Adrian's computer.

Adrian Veidt  
Locked  
| Password

Tony considers. Adrian is, by most standards, a genius, but Tony knows him and how his head works, and he knows that this is going to be a textbook password. He begins with Adrian's interests: alexander3, ozymandias, ramesesii. Nothing. Maybe something more personal? He tries Adrian's middle name, his birthday, the combination of the two: nothing. In a moment of desperation, he types in his own name.

  
Logging in...   


Oh, Adrian, you old softy.

The desktop is, as he expected, composed only of shortcuts to Adrian's most used programs and folders without a document in sight. He quickly goes through the various folders, all with clear names and notes that they are entirely uninteresting. He eyes the flash drive sitting by Adrian's keyboard, and without much guilt, plugs it in. It's called FLOPPY DISK, which Tony finds slightly adorable in spite of himself. He opens it, expecting a presentation, perhaps. After all, what else would Adrian need to put on a flash drive?

The folders read VEIDT SCIENCE, RAYNES, BOYS, PYRAMID DELIVERIES, ALEXANDER, and FINANCIALS. Tony doesn't notice the significance of BOYS the first time he reads through the folder names. Then, he stops. And stares.

_Boys._

He knows that, really, this is the time to stop, but he can't help himself. He opens the folder. To his surprise, it is filled, not with images, but with Word documents. He opens one labeled Ivory and Ermine. He begins to read. The character names seem faintly familiar, recalling an English class from long ago.

Opening Adrian's browser and turning on Private Browsing, he googles them. Apparently, Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray are characters in a book by Oscar Wilde. After a line about velvety tongues, he closes the document in a hurry, feeling vaguely dirty. He opens another one, Pearls Before Swine, which has even him blushes faintly after a few mortifying pages. He doesn't really want to know what Arsène Lupin's tongue is doing to Sherlock Holmes, and he feels forcibly enlightened. He shudders and closes it.

The third one is the worst, though.

He swears aloud because he really never thought about the boys in _Lord of the Flies_ that way, and he never, never wanted to, and Jack, would you stop doing that to Ralph right now?

Tony can't hit CTRL+W fast enough.

The fourth document has characters whom he's never heard of, but von Aschenbach seems a good deal older than the lovely Tadzio. This one more than any of the others is undeniably Adrian's. Maybe, it's the untranslated German endearments or the syrupy prose style. He can hear Adrian reading it in his head, which is an entirely new dimension of Adrian being Big Brother. (Really, the man practically has a fetish for security cameras. It just isn't natural.)

There is one document that is different from the rest. It is a saved bookmark to <http://community.livejournal.com/marvel_kink/567.html?thread=1076279#t1076279>. He clicks it. It sends him to a page titled MARVEL KINK MEME. There isn't anything particularly marvelous about it, except that it is—

—apparently about him being a teen prostitute.

Tony prays to a god he doesn't entirely believe in that this isn't what he thinks it is. It makes him feel slightly sick to his stomach, the idea of someone, anyone, let alone _Adrian_ , writing this sort of thing about him. There is an odd spark of truth in it, though; he remembers being sixteen, and it was awfully like this: angry and arrogant and hormonal. Usually, he fucked girls, though most of the boys were a good deal better.

> Tony Stark is a young, pubescent god. 

Adrian, you _didn't_. He covers his mouth reflexively, though he manages to suppress his gag reflex, something he's actually getting rather good at. He forces himself to keep reading because he feels like he should. He should know what exactly Adrian wrote when he confronts him about this and—

He isn't entirely sure what he's going to do or say, but it won't be pretty, and it will probably mean that there will be no more lunches in their future. There won't be a they. In fact, Tony isn't entirely sure there will be an Adrian when he is finished with him.

Adrian Veidt wrote _porn starring him_.

This is not a compliment. Tony refuses to take it as such. He refuses to acknowledge the little things, anecdotes that he told Adrian, habits that he still has, that he can see reflected in the thing. He certainly isn't going to acknowledge how well Adrian seems to know him, absurd prose style aside.

Tony somewhat resents being called a raging homosexual, but pardons Adrian who is probably just projecting his purple suits and carefully coordinated apartment onto Tony.

He is waiting for Adrian to pull a velvety-tongues on him and write something so objectionable that he will simply be forced to close the window and call Adrian on his cell phone and ask him what the _hell_ is wrong with him.

> He has no desire to imagine his father as he is plunging his length into another man, no desire to visualize his kindly, middle-aged pater familias as he feels the tight heat of another man’s velvet entrance, no desire to contemplate his efficiently charming père as he thrusts and moans amidst designer sheets.

What the hell is wrong with Adrian?

What the— Tony doesn't have words to express it. The idea of thinking about his father while in bed with Adrian is about as repulsive as he can _possibly imagine_ , except Adrian writing this monstrosity.

He begins to skim because it's all manicured lawns and matchy-matchy interior design and neatly paved walkways. He comes to a shuddering halt at the tall, well-built blond man that his sixteen-year-old self is planning to fuck. Tony knows a tall, well-built blond man. In fact, he used to be rather fond of him. He isn't so much, not after reading this.

Tony isn't exactly sure how he feels about Adrian using a thinly veiled version of himself as the client for his underage prostitute self. He's fairly sure he is vastly not okay with it.

He becomes slightly less okay with it when he realizes that, the first time Adrian brought him home, the entire encounter (transcribed and processed through the mind of a perverse sexually frustrated Charles Dickens who read too much modernist fiction) would have read rather like this. The dialogue seemed familiar. He had always hated that Adrian didn't let him wear shoes in his apartment; Tony doesn't like being barefoot, even though Adrian has to be the most immaculate germaphobic man on the planet.

Also, really, why does Adrian feel the need to serve wine to everyone? It's something he's always wondered about. Adrian pushes wine like most people push drugs. Honestly, Tony would almost rather Adrian made him shoot up every time he came over. He can only drink so many glasses of Adrian's newest bottle from France before he needs to down a beer.

Shit, he remembers Adrian telling him to, well, call him Adrian.

He can't tear himself away from it. It's like watching an accident on the highway as each car tumbles into another one: sometimes, he feels sick; sometimes, he wants to scream; sometimes, he can't help marveling at it.

Adrian Veidt isn't romantic. This is absurd. He isn't sure why Dorian-not-Adrian is even pretending to care. If Tony lit scented candles and strewed rose petals across silken sheets, Adrian would point out that it was a fire hazard. Tony makes a face as Doriadrian fusses. He wonders if Adrian is like this in his head. Is this what Adrian wishes he were?

The idea is more than a little horrifying if only because Adrian would sound like the dialogue from a 'nineties TV show, and he really prefers Adrian to constantly speak like he's giving a sound bite than to turn into something witty and flaming.

Hand clamping over mouth, Tony reads quickly, pausing only to look up the definition of supine on the internet. (Who uses words like that in porn? Concentrate on the sex, not the fancy words you can use, Adrian.) Despite himself, he crosses his legs. He doesn't find this interesting and he certainly isn't going to be— He makes a face. Does Adrian think in these words during sex? Really? That's an appalling thought, and Tony decides that continuing it or expanding on it would be a terrible plan.

So he inevitably does.

Adrian probably thinks in complex and compound sentences, throwing in all kinds of wonky phrases and the occasional gerund and maybe even the subjunctive. He probably uses words from other languages and compares their relationship to the ancient Greeks. Tony's body is probably likened to the works of the Masters. From what he has read so far, this all seems not only likely but nearly a certainty.

Tony is sleeping with a walking romance novel.

If Adrian had the time not only to think these things and desire to write them, the sex clearly wasn't good enough. Shit, Tony is going to have to make a greater effort. He has to save the world from Adrian trying to write porn because this is ridiculous and _did he really just hit Adrian and did Adrian just like it_?

Tony's brain grinds to a halt.

Fuck.

Shit.

Damn.

FUCK.

> Dorian whimpers, and initially, Tony fears that it is in pain, and then it turns into a soft low moan.

It hits him low in his gut, and he feels horrible. He is looking at something he wasn't ever meant to see, and this is just wrong and bad and _not good_ , and he should close it and get out of here and tell Adrian that something came up, so sorry, can't see you for the foreseeable future—

And that is when Adrian walks in.

"Tony." He sounds surprised. He probably is surprised, Tony thinks, trying to recover quickly, to find him sitting at his computer.

"Hi."

"Are you ready for lunch?"

Tony discretely closes the browser window he had open and shuts the computer down, trying his best not to break eye contact with Adrian. He wasn't just on Adrian's computer. Of course not. Never! "Sure."

"Well?"

"Um." Tony is going to have to stand up in a minute, and Adrian is going to notice that he is maybe a little bit hard, and he will have to explain himself. Adrian crosses his arms. Oh shit. Tony is so fucked, so colossally fucked because he has no good way to explain this. He stands up.

"Oh."

"Sorry."

"We can take care of that."

"Um."

"Though you'll owe me an explanation afterward."

"Okay?"

"Lean against the desk." He does. Listening to Adrian usually pays off, and this isn't an exception because Adrian crosses the room and kisses him lightly, unzipping his pants at the same time. He sinks down on his knees in front of Tony, and Tony tries very, very hard not to think or to think about what Adrian might be thinking. He focuses on Adrian's soft hands, which are taking his cock out of his boxers and stroking it gently to full hardness. It is gentle and rhythmic and irritatingly disinterested. Adrian has done this before and will do it again to Tony and to other men. He wraps his fingers around the edge of the desk as Adrian takes him in his mouth. Adrian swirls his tongue around Tony's cock, and he can feels its head brushing against the back of Adrian's mouth. He pulls one hand off the desk and threads his fingers through Adrian's hair, though he knows that Adrian would tell him off if his mouth weren't otherwise occupied. He watches Adrian disinterestedly. Adrian is good at this, and Tony doesn't really care to know why. There are a lot of things about Adrian that Tony is beginning to realize he doesn't care to know.

He is going to pretend that he did not just come thinking about his teenage self fucking Adrian because that is really and truly so far beyond fucked up that he cannot even go there.

"Do you even enjoy that?"

"Not particularly."

"Oh, right." He wonders why Adrian does it, then, but he wonders that about a lot of the things that Adrian does, authorial habits not excluded. He wonders why Adrian writes about sex and about gay sex and about gay sex involving underaged boys and about gay sex involving underaged boys who happen to be his boyfriend and about gay sex involving underaged boys who happened to be Adrian's boyfriend fucking thinly disguised Adrian doppelgangers and about gay sex involving underaged boys who happened to be Adrian's boyfriend fucking thinly disguised Adrian doppelgangers with unexpected light BDSM overtones. He says it in spite of himself:"—Adrian,woulditbebetterifIhityou?"

Adrian stands. There is a splatter of come across Adrian's cheek, but this entirely fails to dim the hard, bright fear that Tony feels at the look in Adrian's eyes. "Why were you reading my private files, Tony?"

"I, um—"

"Never mind. I don't think I want to know," he says with impressive amounts of condescension, even for Adrian. "But, to answer your question, I write fics about rape as well, and I don't want to be raped."

"Then, why did you _write it_?"

Adrian's voice is thin and scraping. "Tony, the subject matter does not reflect the preferences of the author."

Tony doesn't point out the obvious contradiction here because he values his life, actually. "All right."

Glancing at his watch, Adrian says, "We are going to be late for our lunch reservations. You were supposed to meet me there, you know."

"Sorry. You wouldn't believe the day I'm having."

"Really."

Well, actually, maybe, Adrian would. "No-o."

"Tony Stark, get out of my office."

Tony does. They ride in silence down the elevator. Tony isn't sure that Adrian is ever going to speak to him again until he adds as they exit the elevator, "That said, creativity would not go unappreciated."


End file.
